Tag Archives | GMO

Vandana Shiva, the Indian environmental activist and anti-globalization author, tells us “We Must End Monsanto’s Colonization, It’s Enslavement of Farmers,” writing at EcoWatch:

Citizens of the U.S. are being denied the right to know what they are feeding their families. Despite the fact that 90 percent of American citizens want GMO labeling on their food, big business is doing everything it can to prevent people from accessing their rights. Representative Pompeo’s bill, popularly known as the DARK Act (Denying Americans the Right to Know), has been written almost entirely by the biotech industry lobby. While American citizens are advocating for their rights to knowledge and healthy, affordable food, Monsanto’s legal team is busy on every legislative level trying to prevent this from happening.

‘We know this: We can’t let this bill get through the U.S. Senate.’ (Image: JustLabelIt.org)

This article originally appeared on Common Dreams. See more of Ronnie Cummins’ articles here.

On Thursday, 275 members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted in favor of H.R. 1599, the DARK (Deny Americans the Right to Know) Act. By voting for the DARK Act, these politicians voted against truth and transparency, against science, against the more than century-old right of states to legislate on matters relating to food safety and labeling.

They voted against the 90-percent of Americans who are in favor of mandatory labeling of GMOs. They voted against the producers of non-GMO foods.

They voted against you.

Now that the DARK Act has been approved by the House, we’ll have to stop it in the Senate. We have to move fast—because Monsanto is desperate to pass a bill that preempts mandatory GMO labeling laws at the state and federal levels, before Vermont’s GMO labeling law takes effect next year.

WASHINGTON – Center for Food Safety (CFS) today expressed strong opposition to Representative Pompeo’s newly revised genetically engineered (GE) food labeling preemption bill (H.R. 1599), which now has been greatly expanded to not only prohibit all labeling of GE foods, but also to make it unlawful for states or local governments to restrict GE crops in any way. These new provisions would not only prohibit any future state and local laws, but also undemocratically nullify GE crop regulations that have existed in numerous counties across the country for over a decade. The bill would also further weaken already weak federal regulation of GE crops, while at the same time forbidding local communities from opting to protect their citizens, their farmers, and their environments.

“One doesn’t expect Dr Frankenstein to show up in a wool sweater,” wrote political commentator Charles Krauthammer, ominously, in the March 1997 issue of Time magazine. He was referring to British scientist Dr Ian Wilmut, who eight months earlier had successfully created Dolly, the world’s most famous sheep, by cloning her from another adult sheep’s cell.

Krauthammer’s criticism was unsparing. “This was not supposed to happen,” he insisted. Dolly was “a cataclysmic” creature. But PPL Therapeutics, the company responsible for funding the science behind Dolly, was undeterred, and four years later produced five cloned female pigs. Again, the news provoked outrage. Lisa Lange, a spokeswoman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, echoed Krauthammer when she dismissed justifications of cloning: “There’s always a reason given to validate these Frankenstein-like experiments.”

It seems that at least some giant corporations have finally understood that we don’t want crap in our food, whether the crap concerned is chemical additives, high fructose corn syrup or genetically modified organisms. Last week saw an announcement by Kraft that it would eliminate chemicals from its mac and cheese and by Pepsi that it would eliminate aspartame from Diet Pepsi; this week starts with news (reported by the New York Times) from Chipotle that they won’t be serving any genetically altered food:

In a first for a major restaurant chain, Chipotle Mexican Grill on Monday will begin serving only food that is free of genetically engineered ingredients.

Photo: Thomas Hawk (CC)

“This is another step toward the visions we have of changing the way people think about and eat fast food,” said Steve Ells, founder and co-chief executive of Chipotle. “Just because food is served fast doesn’t mean it has to be made with cheap raw ingredients, highly processed with preservatives and fillers and stabilizers and artificial colors and flavors.”

In 2013, Chipotle was the first restaurant chain to indicate which items contained genetically modified organisms, and a small but growing number of restaurants, largely in fine dining, also now label their menus.

About 70 percent of the world’s poor are farmers, and to raise them out of poverty requires access to basic resources such as fertilizer, water, and the infrastructure to properly store or transport crops to market—not expensive, resource-intensive GMO seeds. (Credit: La Montañita Co-op)

The biotechnology industry “myth” that feeding billions of people necessitates genetically engineered agriculture has been debunked by a new report out Tuesday by the nonprofit health organization Environmental Working Group.

The report, Feeding the World Without GMOs(pdf), argues that investment in genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, has failed to expand global food security. It advocates more traditional methods “shown to actually increase food supplies and reduce the environmental impact of production.”

Over the past 20 years, the report notes, global crop yields have only grown by 20 percent—despite the massive investment in biotechnology.

The battle over genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, reached the U.S. capital on Wednesday when news broke that Kansas Republican Rep. Mike Pompeo will reintroduce a bill that blocks states from requiring GMO labeling.

The legislation, dubbed by critics the Deny Americans the Right-to-Know or DARK Act, grants the Secretary of Health and Human Services sole authority to mandate GMO labeling and sets forth particular standards for any label that contains claims that GMOs were or were not used in the production of the food— hampering any attempts by the Food and Drug Administration to pass legislation on the federal level.

Further, the bill preempts any local or state requirement and thus would overturn existing laws in Vermont, Connecticut and Maine, which critics say is a direct attack on state sovereignty.

‘This neoliberal agenda of deregulation and privatization poses a serious threat to food sovereignty and the ability of food producers and consumers to define their own food systems and policies,’ says campaigners

Food sovereignty activists are shining a light on a closed-door meeting between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which are meeting in London on Monday with representatives of the biotechnology industry to discuss how to privatize the seed and agricultural markets of Africa.

Early Monday, protesters picketed outside the Gates Foundation’s London offices holding signs that called on the foundation to “free the seeds.” Some demonstrators handed out packets of open-pollinated seeds, which served as symbol of the “alternative to the corporate model promoted by USAID and BMGF.” Others smashed a piñata, which they said represented the “commercial control of seed systems;” thousands of the seeds which filled the pinata spilled across the office steps.

Beth Hoffman points out some deliciously pithy points about the scam that ‘science’ has perpetrated on the masses when it comes to GMO foods – just in time for a new round of propaganda being published by the corporate-owned media – the New York Times, Slate and Grist.

“Let me be clear – I am not “afraid of science,” a claim that someone invariably writes at the end of an article like this one to try and discredit its argument. I, like millions of people around the world, am against genetic engineering, but not because of the proven or refuted science behind it.

So the question is why? Why am I part of a huge, and growing, group not willing to believe the “facts” (according to its proponents) about the benefits of genetic modification?